When leaving sport is the best option
For most of us, the disheartening realisation that we are not going to grow up to become professional athletes arrives early on.
My conviction that I could “do a job” for Gillingham despite my lack of coordination started to fade well before I became a teenager (although this handicap has not served as a barrier to certain individuals in the late 2000s representing Kent’s finest).
For the athletes themselves, very few need to confront this sort of realisation. After all, they have already cashed in the golden ticket. They are inside the inner circle, living the dream that we mere mortals can only gawp at through television screens.
Yet even within the ranks of sports professionals, there is that upper echelon of superstars who dominate earnings, attention and fame. Your Messis, Itojes, Raducanus. For those other athletes, this must be like getting past the rope into an exclusive nightclub but then realising there is a closed-off VIP section full of beautiful people guzzling Dom Perignon. Some will hang around this area all night, hoping to get in.
Others will be content that they have got this far. And then a tiny
‘The penny dropped that I was not going to be the best so I thought, why stay in it?’
minority will accept this fact and head for the exit.
Henry Taylor falls into the latter category. At just 27, he chose to walk away from rugby union last summer despite having a year left on his contract with Northampton. Taylor was the scrum-half of the England team captained by Maro Itoje who won the 2014 Junior World Cup. By his reckoning, he could have played another five or six seasons in the Premiership. But he also realised that his trajectory, interrupted by a succession of knee injuries, was never going to follow that of Itoje’s, so he has taken up a job in the City.
“I was never going to be more than a Premiership player,” Taylor said. “I was not going to make England, I was not going to push on further than that. I decided, if I am not going to be at the top then why stay in it?
“Most players believe they are good enough to make it to the top, even if they say otherwise. That’s probably the correct way of thinking if you want to be a professional rugby player. That’s why I knew I was in the wrong place. Last season, the penny dropped that I was not going to be the best.”
Taylor’s rationale was also based on the fact it was better to start a career in the City on the bottom rung of the ladder while he was still in his twenties than cede a further five years. He has started as a junior broker for the Oil Brokerage and is still coming to terms with the concept of 12-hour days. “It is very, very different, but in terms of learning something new, the mental fatigue is so different to the physical fatigue,” Taylor said. “I am sleeping like a baby every night, which is bizarre because I didn’t sleep that well when I played.”
Not everyone can follow his logic. After all, he has voluntarily chosen to wake up from the dream of being a professional athlete. A couple of his former team-mates asked him if he was mad. Even his family have struggled to come to terms with his decision. “They will also say things like: ‘Why would you not play professional rugby while you can? You have such an amazing lifestyle. The City desk job is always there for you.’ To say I am stopping by choice is a hard thing for certain people to understand.”
You suspect Taylor’s degree of self-awareness is a rare quality among his former contemporaries. He wanted to have his exit strategy in place before retirement was thrust upon him. Taylor does not know how he is going to react as the Gallagher Premiership returns. Part of him may think about what he left behind – the buzz of playing in front of a full house, the ecstasy of victory and the bonds forged in a changing room – but he is convinced that he has made the right decision.
“I have a five-year head start on people retiring in their thirties,” he said. “It was right for me because I knew I was never going to make it to the top of the game. My motivations were very simple: I want to build a career where I am going to be very successful and I was not going to find that in rugby.”